The year of the zombie: How HBO’s mega-budgeted The Last of Us took over the province from Waterton to Grande Prairie​on April 10, 2025 at 11:00 am

There are not many moments like this in The Last of Us. Sharp-eyed Albertans may recognize a few landmarks, but the whole point was to transform the city and various locations across the province into a wide variety of decaying post-apocalyptic vistas. Among the wrecked cities that Calgary plays, for instance, are Boston, Kansas City and even Jakarta. The aforementioned zombie apocalypse has given most of these places a similar aesthetic: empty, crumbling buildings, burned-out cars scattered across streets overgrown with weeds, an eerie, oppressive stillness. This is part of the reason the ambitious production spent more than a year in Alberta, employing hundreds of locals, pumping hundreds of millions into the economy and helping strengthen the province’s reputation as a versatile backdrop for big-budget film and television that is not limited to westerns and picturesque period pieces.

The Last of Us is not the first big-budget production to be shot in Calgary. It’s not even the first big-budget zombie production to be shot in Calgary. But in this golden age of prestige television, big is relative. The Last of Us is big, big, BIG. By some educated guesstimates, the nine-episode series cost upwards of $100 million. This makes it one of the most expensive television series in the history of the medium and certainly the biggest project in the history of the Alberta film and television industry. For more than a year, the production travelled from Waterton to Grande Prairie and most points in between. The show will finally land on Jan. 15, when it will debut on HBO.

“Right from the beginning, it was decided that we didn’t just want to find abandoned things, ruined things or destroyed areas and script them in,” Nolan says. “They wanted to go after reality and present the world that we see today but 20 years into the future after this has happened. How do we transform that in a way that brings the audience in? It was tricky when you are looking at streets or certain areas of downtown or sections of highway or rural roads and even smaller towns and communities. We needed to get everybody involved. When you work on certain shows, you can film at a certain business on a street. Obviously, you talk to everybody and make them aware of what’s happening, but you don’t necessarily need their involvement. In this case, we needed everybody involved. If we were in a situation where one person in the neighbourhood or on the street wasn’t willing to play ball, we wouldn’t be able to do what we needed to do.”

Calgary and Alberta are very accommodating to film and television crews. Still, filming massive scenes in the middle of a city, particularly if they required lengthy shutdowns, can be complicated affairs that require lots of prep work. Part of location scouting is finding the right spots to film, but an equally important part is going through the right channels and jumping through the right bureaucratic hoops to get permission. Taking over the Fourth Avenue flyover for more than a week, for instance, is no small matter.